What Go Fish Gets Right About Strategy

Most nights, I play Go Fish with my kids before bed. It is a simple card game. Players try to collect matching sets by asking one another for cards they need. If the other player does not have the card, you “go fish” and draw from the deck. Whoever completes the most sets wins. The stakes are low, although five-year-olds do not always see it that way.

One night, a basic rule of the game struck me as surprisingly relevant to strategy. You cannot ask another player for just any card. You must already hold a matching one. If you ask for a seven, you already have a seven in your hand. The game makes you look at your own hand before asking for something across the table. Organizations do not have to follow that rule, and often do not.

Strategic planning frequently starts in the opposite direction. Leaders study growing markets, emerging technologies, changing customer preferences, and the moves of competitors. Much of what we teach about strategy encourages this. Michael Porter’s work on competitive strategy directs attention to industry structure and the pressures created by customers, suppliers, rivals, substitutes, and potential entrants. Those conditions affect which positions are available and how profitable they are likely to be. That analysis helps leaders decide whether a market is attractive. It cannot tell them, by itself, whether the market is attractive for their organization. Yet organizations often move too quickly from “there is an opportunity” to “this is an opportunity for us.” Universities are one example. Many rushed into online programs after seeing demand grow, without asking why students who were no longer constrained by geography would choose their program over hundreds of others. A market existed, but that did not mean every university had something distinctive to offer within it.

Go Fish treats those questions as part of the same decision. Your hand does not tell you what will happen, but it limits what you can ask for and gives some direction to your search. Organizations have hands of their own, built from what they know, what they can do, and the relationships and reputation they have accumulated. Some parts of that hand can be copied fairly easily. Others reflect the organization’s particular history. The resource-based view in strategy begins with the fact that organizations are not interchangeable. Even when they face the same environment, their different resources leave them better prepared for some opportunities than others. Leaders therefore need to ask what their organization can do in a market that others would struggle to match.

This is where the ubiquitous SWOT framework is supposed to help. It places an organization’s strengths and weaknesses alongside the opportunities and threats in its environment. In practice, organizations—and students—often fill in the four boxes and treat the result as strategic analysis. But placing the categories beside one another is not the same as connecting them. Which change in the environment makes a particular capability more valuable? Which opportunity fits this organization unusually well? Go Fish builds that connection into the rules. You look outward, but your search begins with what you hold.

Looking at the hand first has a downside. A company that pursues only opportunities matching its current capabilities can become trapped by the strengths that once made it successful. Those strengths influence what its leaders notice, which possibilities they take seriously, and what investments seem reasonable. Kodak offers a useful example. The company did not fail because it never saw digital photography coming. Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built one of the first digital cameras in 1975, and the company continued to invest in digital technology. The deeper problem was that digital photography threatened a highly profitable business built around film, paper, chemicals, and processing. Kodak had an entire organization built for a world that digital photography was beginning to replace.

Dorothy Leonard-Barton used the term “core rigidity” for capabilities that help an organization succeed but later inhibit change. Capabilities do not consist only of equipment or technical knowledge. They become embedded in managerial practices, employee skills, and assumptions about how the business works. Kodak’s hand had served it extraordinarily well, but it also influenced how the company understood a changing game.

An organization cannot limit itself indefinitely to opportunities that fit what it already does. Sometimes the hand needs to change. A company may need to hire people with different expertise, form a partnership, experiment with an unfamiliar technology, or build a capability that will not pay off immediately. In Go Fish, the hand can change when a player has to draw from the deck. You may find the card you wanted, or you may draw something that opens a different possibility. Organizations face similar uncertainty when they search and experiment. What they learn may support the strategy they had in mind or point them somewhere else.

An organization should not assume that its present capabilities define its future. But if it decides to build a new capability, it should know why. Leaders should be able to explain what the organization needs to learn, what it can realistically build or acquire, and how that effort connects to an opportunity. “This market is growing” is not much of a strategy. Internal and external analysis are often taught as separate tasks. In practice, each changes the meaning of the other. What an organization possesses affects which opportunities it can pursue, while changes in the environment alter the value of what it possesses.

Tomorrow night, one of my kids will probably ask whether I have a four. Before asking, they will have to hold a four themselves. Organizations face no such rule. They can chase any market or imitate any competitor without first considering whether the move makes sense for them. Before asking what opportunities are out there, they might benefit from spending more time looking at what they already hold.